“ကမ ၻာျပားၿပီတဲ့”

ေက်ာ္လင္းဦး

ကမ ၻာျပားၿပီလို႔ေျပာတာ အေၾကာင္းမဲ့မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အေၾကာင္းရိွပါတယ္။
လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ငါးရာေက်ာ္က ကမ ၻာၾကီးလံုး၀ိုင္းေနတယ္ ဆိုတဲ့ေျပာဆိုခ်က္မ်ိဳးဟာ လူသား ေတြအတြက္ အထူးအဆန္းျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဒီေန႔ ဒီအခ်ိန္မွာ ကမ ၻာၾကီးျပားေနၿပီလို႔ေျပာ ၾကဆိုၾကတာေတြဟာ အထူးအဆန္းမဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ဥပမာ တစ္ခုၾကည့္ရေအာင္။
အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ကပ္လွ်က္ရိွတဲ့ မကၠစီကိုႏိုင္ငံဟာ ကမ ၻာေပၚမွာလုပ္အခအနည္းဆံုးႏိုင္ငံတစ္ခု ပါ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ သူ႔ႏိုင္ငံမွာ ထုတ္လုပ္သမွ်ပစၥည္းေတြဟာေစ်းေပါရမွာေပါ့။ ဒါေပမယ့္ သူတို႔ႏိုင္ငံက ျပည္သူအမ်ားစုကိုးကြယ္တဲ့ အပ်ိဳစင္ ဂိုဒါလုပ ရုပ္ထုေလးကိုေတာ့ တရုတ္ျပည္ကတင္သြင္းေနရ တယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔လဲဆိုေတာ့ တရုတ္ျပည္ကထုတ္လုပ္ၿပီး သေဘၤာတစ္တန္၊ ကားတစ္တန္နဲ႔ မကၠစီကို ပို႔လိုက္တဲ့ လမ္းစရိတ္ပါထည့္ေပါင္းလိုက္တာေတာင္မွ အဲဒီရုပ္ထုေလးတစ္ခုရဲ ႔တန္ဖိုး ဟာ မကၠစီကိုမွာ ထုတ္လုပ္တဲ့ တန္ဖိုးထက္အမ်ာၾကီးသက္သာေနလို႔ပါ။ ဆိုေတာ့ မကၠစီကိုရဲ ႔ျပည္ တြင္းေစ်းကြက္ကို တရုတ္ျပည္ကလက္ဦးသြားတာေပါ့။
ေနာက္ထပ္ရိွေသးတယ္။ အီဂ်စ္မွာ မူဆလင္ ဥပုဒ္လအတြင္း ကေလးေတြကိုင္တဲ့ ရိုးရာမီးပံုးေလး ေတြရိွပါတယ္။ အထဲမွာ ဖေယာင္းတိုင္ေလးေတြထြန္းလို႔ေပါ့။ ဥပုဒ္လအတြင္း ကေလးေတြဟာ အဲဒီမီးပံုးေလးေတြကိုင္ၿပီး ရိုးရာသီးခ်င္းေလးေတြကို တစ္အိမ္တက္ဆင္းသြားေရာက္ဆိုေလ့ရိွပါ တယ္။ အခုေတာ့ အဲဒီရိုးရာမီးပံုးေလးေတြကို တရုတ္ျပည္ကတင္သြင္းတယ္တဲ့။ တရုတ္ျပည္လုပ္ မီးပံုးေလးေတြမွာ ဖေယာင္းတိုင္မပါေတာ့ဘူး။ ဖေယာင္းတို္င္အစား နီယြန္မီးသီးေလးကို အထဲမွာ ထည့္ထားတယ္။ အီဂ်စ္ျပည္လုပ္ လက္ျဖစ္ရိုးရာမီးပံုးေတြကေတာ့ ဖန္နဲ႔လုပ္ထားတဲ့အတြက္ နဲနဲ ေလးတယ္။ အခုတရုတ္မီးပံုးေတြကုိ ပလက္စတစ္အၾကည္သားနဲ႔လုပ္တဲ့အတြက္ ေပါ့လည္းေပါ့ တယ္။ ေသလည္း ေသသပ္တယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ခိုင္္လည္းခို္င္ခန္႔တယ္။ ဒီထက္ ပိုအေရးၾကီးတာက ေတာ့ တရုတ္မီးပံုးေတြဟာ အီဂ်စ္လုပ္ လက္ျဖစ္မီးပံုးေတြထက္ ပိုၿပီးေစ်းသက္သာေနပါတယ္။ တရုတ္ျပည္လုပ္မီးပံုးေလးေတြမွာ မိုက္ခရိုခ်စ္ပ္ျပားေလးေတြထည့္ထားၿပီး အီဂ်စ္ရိုးရာသီးခ်င္းေတြ ရဲ့ တီးလံုးေလးေတြေတာင္ ထည့္ထားလိုက္ေသးတယ္။ ကဲ ဒီေတာ့ အီဂ်စ္မိဘေတြက တရုတ္က လာတဲ့ မီးပံုးေလးေတြပဲ သူတို႔ကေလးေတြကို ၀ယ္ေပးေတာ့တာေပါ့။ တဆက္တည္းမွာပဲ အီဂ်စ္ ရိုးရာအိမ္တြင္း လက္မႈလုပ္ငန္းေတြလည္း အရံႈးေပၚကုန္ေရာ။ ဒါေတြဟာ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆိုေတာ့ ကမ ၻာျပားလို႔ ပါပဲ။
အခုဆိုယင္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးဆဲႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားဟာ ကမ ၻာျပားတဲ့ ဒဏ္ကိုေတာ္ေတာ္ေလးအလူး အလိမ့္ခံေနရၿပီ။ ကမ ၻာျပားၾကီးထဲမွာ ရိွတဲ့ က်ေနာ္တို႔ႏိုင္ငံေတြရဲ ႔အေနအထားကို ျခိမ္းေျခာက္မႈ ေတြရိွေနၿပီ။ ဒီ႔အတြက္ လုပ္စရာတစ္ခုတည္းပဲရိွပါတယ္။ ဒါကေတာ့ အဲဒီႏိုင္ငံေတြက ျပည္သူ လူထုနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြက ကိုယ့္ကုိယ္ကုိရိုးသားဖို႔ပါပဲ။
ဘယ္လိုရိုးသားၾကမလဲ။ အရက္သမားေတြ အရက္ျဖတ္သလိုေပါ့။ အေနာက္ႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာေတာ့ အရက္ျဖတ္ခ်င္တဲ့ လူေတြ သီးျခားဖြဲ႔ထားတဲ့ ကလပ္အသင္းေတြရိွတယ္။ အဲဒီအသင္းက အသင္း ၀င္ေတြဟာ တစ္ပတ္မွာတစ္ခါ ဆံုေတြ႔ေလ့ရိွၾကတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ က်န္တဲ့အသင္း၀င္ေတြေရွ ႔မွာ ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကုိ ထၿပီးမိတ္ဆက္ရတယ္။ ဥပမာ ႔ ႔ ႔ ႔ ႔ ႔ “ က်ေနာ့္ နာမည္ ေက်ာ္လင္းဦးပါ၊ က်ေနာ္ အရက္စြဲေနတာ ဘယ္ႏွစ္လရိွပါၿပီ။” စသည္အားျဖင့္ေပါ။ ဒီလိုပဲ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးဆဲႏိုင္ငံေတြက ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေတြဟာလည္း အားလံုးရဲ႕ေရွ႕မွာ မတ္တပ္ရပ္ၿပီ “ က်ေနာ္ကေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ကပါ။ က်ေနာ္တို႔ ႏိုင္ငံဟာ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးမႈအေတာ့္ကို ေနာက္က်က်န္ေနခဲ့ပါၿပီ” လို႔ေျပာရဲရမယ္။ ေျပာႏိုင္ရမယ္။ ဒါဆိုယင္ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးမႈေနာက္က်ေနတဲ့ ဘ၀ကေန ရံုးထြက္ႏိုင္လိမ့္မယ္။
စစ္ေအးေခတ္ၾကီးကုန္ဆံုးၿပီးေနာက္ ခင္မ်ားတို႔က်ေနာ္တို႔ဒီေန႔ၾကံဳေနရတဲ့ေခတ္ကို “လက္ကား ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး” ေခတ္လို႔ေခၚခ်င္တယ္။ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔လဲဆိုေတာ့ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးကို အံုနဲ႕ က်င္းနဲ႕လုပ္ရမယ့္ ေခတ္ျဖစ္လို႔ပါပဲ။ အဲဒီ လက္ကားျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္လဲေရးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကို ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးဆဲ တိုင္းျပည္ေတြမွာရိွတဲ့ လက္တစ္ဆုတ္စာေလာက္သာရိွတဲ့ ထိ္ပ္တန္းေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြခ်ည္းပဲ လုပ္ လို႔ရပါတယ္။ ၁၉၉၄ ကေန ၂၀၀၀ ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း မကၠစီကုိရဲ႕စီးပြားေရးကို ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလ ဲလုပ္တဲ့ အခါ အဲဒီတုန္းက သမတျဖစ္တဲ့ အာနက္စတို ဇက္ဒီလို အပါအ၀င္ ထိပ္သီးေခါင္းေဆာင္ သံုး ေယာက္ထဲ ဆံုးျဖတ္လုပ္ကုိင္ခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒီလိုပဲ တရုတ္ျပည္မွာ တိန္႔ေရွာင္ပိန္က ကြန္ျမဴနစ္အေတြး အေခၚကို စြန္႔လြတ္ၿပီး “ခ်မ္းသာျခင္းဟာ ဂုဏ္ရိွတယ္” လို႔ေျပာတုန္းက သူရဲ႕ထိပ္တန္းအၾကံေပး အနည္းအက်ဥ္းေလာက္ပဲ ဒီကိစၥကို ၾကိဳသိခဲ့တာပါ။
ဒီလိုျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈ မလုပ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ တိုင္းျပည္ေတြကေတာ့ ကမ ၻာျပားၾကီးထဲမွာ ေနာက္က်က်န္ေန ဦးမွာပါ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ “လက္ကား ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး” ျပဳလုပ္ႏိုင္တဲ့ တိုင္းျပည္ေတြအတြက္ကေတာ့ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးဟာ ဒီအဆင့္မွာတင္ ရပ္လို႔မရပါဘူး။ ဒီထက္ နက္နဲတဲ့ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးအ ဆင့္က်န္ပါေသးတယ္။ ဒါကေတာ့ “လက္လီ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး” ပါ။
ဒီ “လက္လီျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး” အဆင့္မွာ တျခားႏိုင္ငံနဲ႔ကုန္သြယ္တာတို႔၊ တျခားႏိုင္ငံက ကိုယ့္ ဆီမွာ လာၿပီးရင္းႏွီးျမႇပ္ႏွံတာတို႔နဲ႔တင္ မလံုေလာက္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ကိုယ့္ႏိုင္ငံမွာရိွတဲ့ အားနည္းခ်က္၊ အားသာခ်က္ေတြကို ၾကည့္ၿပီးလိုသလိုျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲဖို႔လိုအပ္လာပါၿပီ။ ဒီေနရာမွာ အဓိကထား ၾကည့္ရမယ့္ နယ္ပယ္ ေလးရပ္ရိွပါတယ္။ ဒါေတြကေတာ့- လမ္း၊ တံတား၊လွ်ပ္စစ္မီး၊ စတဲ့အေျခခံ အေဆာက္အအံု နဲ႔ဆိုင္တဲ့ နယ္ပယ္၊ ဥပေဒ၊ နည္းဥပေဒ ေတြကုိေသေသခ်ာခ်ာလိုက္နာျခင္းရိွမရိွ ထိန္းေက်ာင္းေပးမယ့္ တရားရံုးတို႔၊ ျပည္သူ႔ရဲ တို႔နဲ႔ဆိုင္တဲ့ နယ္ပယ္၊ ပညာေရးနယ္ပယ္ နဲ႔ ယဥ္ ေက်းမႈနယ္ပယ္တို႔ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီနယ္ပယ္ေလးရပ္မွ အားနည္းခ်က္ေတြရိွေနၿပီဆိုယင္ေတာ့ အား ေကာင္းေအာင္လုပ္ထားေပေတာ့။ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ယင္ေတာ့ “လက္လီျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး”ေခတ္မွာ လည္း သူမ်ားေနာက္ကက်န္ေနခဲ့ဦးမွာပဲ။
က်ေနာ္တို႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံကေတာ့ “လက္ကားျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး”မွာလည္း သူမ်ားနဲ႔မယွဥ္ႏိုင္၊ “လက္လီ ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရး” က်ေတာ့လည္း ဘာမွန္းမသိျဖစ္ေနဆဲပါ။ ဒါေတြရဲ႕ အရင္းခံ ျပ ႆနာဟာ အာဏာပိုင္မ်ားရဲ႕အသိအျမင္နည္းပါးမႈျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံတကာဗဟုသုတနဲ႔ ပညာေရး အေျခခံနည္းပါးလွတဲ့ ျမန္မာစစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြဟာ အဲဒီျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးေတြနဲ႔ စိမ္းေနဆဲပါ။ အက်ိဳးဆက္အားျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဟာ ခၽြတ္ခ်ံက်မႈေတြဟာ ကာလရွည္ၾကာေနဆဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပ မယ့္ တိုင္းျပည္အတြင္းက ျပႆနာအရပ္ရပ္ဟာ စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြရဲ႕ဥေဏွာက္ေတြနဲ႔မမီွႏိုင္ ေအာင္ ရႈပ္ေထြးေပြလီလာတာနဲ႔အမွ် အာဏာကို က်ားကုတ္က်ားခဲ ဆုတ္ကိုင္ထားခ်င္တဲ့ဆႏၵေတြ တစ္ျဖည္းျဖည္းေမွးမိွန္လာမွာပါ။
အခုလက္ရိွမွာပဲ တိုင္ျပည္အတြင္းက ေလာင္စာဆီျပႆနာကဟာ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြအတြက္ ေခါင္း ခဲစရာျဖစ္ေနရပါၿပီ။ ေလာင္စာဆီကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳၿပီး ျပည္သူလူထုကလႈပ္ရွားလာယင္လည္း ႏိွမ္ ႏွင္းပစ္လိုက္မယ္လို႔ စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြလြယ္လြယ္ကူကူစဥ္းစားထားခဲ့ပံုရပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဒီေန႔ ျပႆနာဟာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြထင္သလို လြယ္လြယ္ကူကူေျဖရွင္းလို႔ရတဲ့ ျပႆနာ မဟုတ္တဲ့အျပင္ ဒီ ေန႔ ကမ ၻာဟာ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြသိတဲ့ လံုး၀န္းတဲ့ကမ ၻာမဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ လံုး၀န္း တဲ့ ကမ ၻာတုန္း ကဆို ယင္ေတာ့ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေတြရဲ႕ဖိႏွိပ္မႈဟာ ထင္သလိုက်ဲႏိုင္မွာျဖစ္ေပမယ့္ အခုေတာ့ ဒီေန႔ျဖစ္တဲ့ ဆႏၵျပပြဲ ေတြကို ညတြင္းခ်င္း ကမ ၻာက သိႏိုင္ၿပီျဖစ္လို႔ ကမ ၻာျပားတဲ့ ဒဏ္ကို ျမန္မာ ႏိုင္ငံက စစ္ အာဏာရွင္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးေတြအလူးအလဲခံေနရပါၿပီ။ ဒါဆိုယင္ေတာ့ ကမ ၻာျပားမွာ ေနထိုင္ၾကတဲ့ လူေတြရဲ႕ ဘ၀နဲ႕ေလွ်ာ္ညီစြာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက စစ္ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ၾကီးေတြလည္း ျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲေရးေတြ ကို အားသြန္ခြန္စိုက္စလုပ္ဖို႔လိုေနပါၿပီ။

(၀န္ခံခ်က္။ ။ Thomas Friedman ရဲ႕ “World Is Flat” စာအုပ္ထဲမွ အခန္း (၉)၊ The Virgin of Guadalupe ကိုဆီေလွ်ာ္ေအာင္ ဘာသာျပန္ဆိုထားပါသည္။ စာေရးသူ)

The Clash of Civilization Vs Flat World in Globalization Era

by Kyaw Lin Oo

Essay

The globalization is a process that cannot be stopped by anyone in the world. It also effect to everyone including the people who are living in leased developed countries. Actually, globalization is an engine for economic development for some country. However, it became the cause of extreme poverty and the reason for thriving of fundamentalism in other. However, at least in my perspective, the world is moving to “flat world” rather than the world that occur clash between civilizations as Samuel P. Huntington viewed. I have four different reasons for that.

The very first and the most basic reason is that the economic development is priority for every country after the end of cold war era. During the cold war, the conflict of two ideologies can be found in everywhere. Even in some non-alliance countries, there were ideology conflicts between two political camps. So, almost every country faced civil war or ideology war so that they cannot emphasize on economic development. After the cold war era, the many third world countries are released from poverty like phoenix bird emerges from ashes. So, most of the countries have chosen development path and abandon the war and fighting with other countries. In this condition, the clashes between different civilizations are impossible on the world because these countries are sharing interest and compromising in business oriented dialogue.

The second factor is the development of communication technology. In the globalization world, the new technology for telecommunication is thriving. So, we can communicate from one corner of the world to other corner within seconds. Therefore, we can know what is happening around the world and we can response to inappropriate action of any person, group, government or even civilization within the short time. This is advantage of development of telecommunication era. In this era, any country or group cannot hide their action and we can know immediately from other part of the work. Therefore, the world is becoming flat as Thomas Friedman argue in his book, “World is Fat”.

My third point is that the liberal democracy is becoming final choice for every country for its economic and political development. Even some military dictatorship regimes need to pretend that democratic political system is the only system that the country is heading to. In Muslim world, democratic system is popular among the Muslim population in most of the country, except two or three countries. And also liberal democratic system is one of the factors for economic development for these countries. Therefore, the countries chose the democratic path for sake of economic development whether they like it or not. Therefore, it is impossible to be clashes between western Christian civilization and Islam civilization of Middle East or Christian civilization of west and Confucian of East and South East Asia because all countries are orienting toward democratic political system even thought they have different degree of democracy and political openness.

The fourth and final point of my perspectives is the western education system which become global education standard of every country. The people from younger generation are heading toward western countries with only one reason which is their thirsty of western education. This some education form or standard can create more understanding and peaceful way problem solving on differences. It is sure that there can be some stigma of society like some group of youngsters became extreme terrorists. These young members of society are out of the mainstream of the whole population in that society. They might come from extreme poverty or abandon from the society. But, those young people are only the handful of the whole population and they cannot change the whole world.

Because of above reasons, the world is becoming flat world for every developed or developing country. We may see some conflict of clash between different countries or different group of the same country. But, none of these are clash of civilizations as Huntington argues. These are local conflicts for certain period of time. After we pass this period, these countries would be looking for development oriented path for the interest of their countries. And the people and the leader will accept the argument of “flat world” and struggle to achieve economic development within the context of “flat world”.

Now, every country more understands that the clashes between the states or civilizations are no preferable situation for them. So, they are looking for cooperation and coordination with economic powerful countries, like United States and Japan. However, there can be confrontation between the states for economic interests. However, they understand well that they can solve these confrontations with peaceful way or through dialogue. It is culture of “flat world” and any country who doesn’t understand this culture will be far behind the other in term of economic development and political development as well.

The primary goal of the author of “The Clash of Civilization” was to response to Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and The Last Man. However, when the 9/11 event was happened on US soil, Huntington’s theory for clash of civilization reemerged as leading theory to solve the conflicts with Muslim extremist groups, especially fundamentalist Al Qaida. However, this theory also cannot explain the whole scenario of the whole world from Asia to Africa and Latin America to Western Hampshire. There are some conflict in Middle East and some countries of South East Asia. However, these are not conflicts between the two civilizations and it is rather the conflict between the handful of extremist group and the whole society.

Therefore, the flat world theory is more related to today globalization era and every country can get chance to thrive their economy and standard of living by dancing with tune of globalization ideology. And the world is flat because of globalization and as the world is flat, the globalization process is faster than before for every global citizen of today.

The Economic Development of Thailand and Singapore

by Kyaw Lin Oo

Essay

The economic of Thailand and Singapore has been developed with different momentum because of different historical, social, cultural, and political background. However, these two countries’ development past can be explained by W.W. Rostow’s five stages theory of economic development. According to Rostow, there are five stages for the economic development for every country. These are traditional stage, pre-condition for “take off” stage, take off stage, Drive to maturity stage, and economic maturity stage. Every developed and developing country has experience of passing these five stages although some countries are stopped at the traditional stage.

Thailand and Singapore of Southeast Asia countries passed all five stages like any other country. Although they have different pace for economic development, both countries are currently at the final stage of maturity stage.

In Thailand case, the economic development was started in two decade ago. Before that, the economic development was at the traditional stage. In this stage, the political authority of Thailand was military dictatorship system in one way or another. At that time, the economic policy is centralized policy and all economic decision was come from central government. Therefore, the development pace of Thailand was very slow at that time. After that, economic policy of Thailand was dramatically changed. In the meanwhile, the political system of Thailand was also opened in somehow. Therefore, we can say that it is precondition stage of take off. At that time, democratic norm and cultural was started to utilize in Thai politics. At that time, Chatichai Choonhavan’s government came into power and he announced “to change battle fields to markets”.

After that, “take off” period came into effect and new technology was thriving in Thai economic. Especially, banking sector was booming in Thailand. And small and median size business was thriving in Thailand. This take off stage of economic development was disturbed by 1997 economic crisis in 1997. However, this economic crisis was recovered within three years and Thai economic was going up when Taksin Shinawat came into power in 2000. Under the rule of billionaire turn politician, Thai economy was at the stage of Driving to maturity if it is not maturity stage. From the Drive to maturity stage, today Thai economy enters into the maturity stage which is high in consumption of market force. During this maturity stage or at the interval of each stage, there was up side-down period of Thai economy. However, generally, Thai economy is steadily going up from the time of Chatichai Choonhavan.

Like Thailand, Singapore’s economy has been progressed long time before Thai economy was take- off. When Singapore was part of the Malaysia, the economy of Singapore was purely traditional economy and the society’s survival was based on individual production. When Singapore was separated from Malaysia, Singapore policy makers tried to open up the economy of Singapore and accept foreign direct investment (FDI) as a tool for economic development of Singapore. This period was precondition stage of take off in Singapore economy. When all foreign direct investment came onto the Singapore soil, Singapore economy was really take off from traditional economy. For this development, Singapore’s former prime minister and currently minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew was at the center of Political scene. As Singapore’s economy is developed, consumption of Singapore’s market is increased. Then, the economy became the drive to maturity stage. Currently, Singapore’s economy is at the maturity stage. Unlike Thailand, Singapore’s economy has never faced crisis or disturb. Therefore, the economy is progress steadily.

In both countries, the main contributor of economic development is political stability. It is obvious reason in Thai economy. When Thai politics was stable, and the economy was progress and when the politics became sour, the economy was going down. Currently, Thai economy is going down and the exchange rate is unstable because of the military coup in last year and mismanagement of junta backed intern government. In Singapore, the political situation is stable through out the decades and this political stability became a driving force for the economic development.

However, both countries use authoritarian or semi-authoritarian as mean for political stability in different degree. In comparing these two countries, Singaporean politics is more authoritative than Thai politics. Therefore, successive Thai governments faced challenge mainly from Army and as a result Thai economic development was disturbed. In Singapore, only one political party won in every election and the opposition is very weak in Singapore politics. Therefore, Singaporean politics is more stable than Thai politics.

Unlike Western political culture, Democratic norm and standard in Asian politics, especially Southeast Asia politics, are very young. In this stage, the governments of Southeast Asia nations try to get political stability with cost of authoritarianism and strong government because this political stability is only driving force for economic development. However, as the economy is developed in certain level and the educated middle class of society is expended, the question of democratic norm and standard is reappeared and the government must relax its control over the population certainly. Therefore, at the Rostow’s final stage of Maturity in economic development, the Asia governments are more democratic and people’s participation in political process becomes crucial.